


Red Sky In The Morning

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: and together they fight crime [1]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 05:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8784313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Jenny, Sarah and Abby live in a castle, and together they fight crime.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Primeval Denial art challenge, in response to [this](http://primeval-denial.livejournal.com/4758028.html) gorgeous bit of artwork by lsellersfic. I didn’t guess she was the artist, but this Jenny’s fondness for Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books now feels even more appropriate! Thank you to Bella and Luka for the beta.

_It starts when she is thirteen and at boarding school, and Demelza has lost her necklace. It's not a valuable necklace. The stones are probably glass. The metal is tarnished and cheap. The design is too fussy for Demelza, who, Jenny knows instinctively, needs plain, simple jewellery to compliment her square face._

_But Demelza wants it back, and Demelza is inconsolable, and Demelza has looked everywhere. Jenny knows this because Demelza is hiccupping out the whole sorry tale on Jenny's shoulder. The shoulder of her school dress is getting distinctly damp._

_"It's always in the last place you look," Jenny says, patting and soothing Demelza, but Jenny's brain is running at a hundred miles an hour._

_Who would want a necklace that isn't worth anything? Someone who enjoys theft for its own sake. Who would steal from sweet-natured, slightly slow Demelza? Someone who likes tormenting those who are weaker than her. Jenny can see the edge of Cleo's smile from here, and it may be true that the necklace will be in the last place Demelza looks, but Jenny's absolutely certain that it will be in the first place Jenny looks._

_The necklace is found two weeks later on top of Demelza's tuck box with a letter of apology, and nobody can prove that it wasn't written by Cleo. Jenny bins all the bobby pins she ruined learning to pick the locks of Cleo's tuck box in classrooms she's never been seen in, and buys a fresh pack from the Boots in the village._

_Cleo gets expelled._

***

 

            It was pitch-black outside the windows of Castle Anburgh, and Jenny was wide awake. Moreover, she'd finished every single Dorothy L Sayers, and if she didn't get up and do something else, she would have to go on to Ngaio Marsh, or perhaps Agatha Christie. Neither author held her attention so well.

 

            She closed her book on her lap and looked over at her companion, black silk hair spilling over Sarah's shoulder and hiding the long, solemn bones of her profile as she flipped through her reference books. Silent as the grave, the only sign of life was the occasional slight tilt of her head or flash of an elegant hand as she made her notes, and Jenny had to repeat her name several times before she looked up.

 

            "Mm?" Sarah leant back in her computer chair with an audible creak, stretching her arms over her head. "What is it?"

 

            Jenny nodded at the papers. "What are you researching?"

 

            "Atlantis," Sarah said with a certain relish, and Jenny's dark eyebrows flew up of their own accord. "It was going to be that collection you wanted me to look into, but late-period Byzantine bores me rigid, and I've already done the quarterly accounts. They're on your desk." She wrinkled her nose, and looked down at her work. "I wanted something... absorbing."

 

            "I know the feeling." Jenny tapped her book's cover, and unfurled her legs. She'd been sitting tucked into the depths of the armchair for hours, as the stack of books next to her attested. "I hate it when you and Abby run operations without me."

 

            "We're big girls." Sarah reached for a fresh biro. "You've done all you can - exotic animals are not your area of expertise. You'd be about as useful on the ground as I would be. _Abby_ , though...”

 

            "Yes. Yes, I know." Jenny ran her hands through her hair. "I wish I could be sure of the exact nature of Sir James's... exotic animals, but that's neither here nor there."

 

            "I thought you trusted Sir James?" Sarah said, in a tone of absent enquiry, and Jenny smiled fondly at the crown of her dark head and reminded herself that there was a reason she never let Sarah anywhere near politics or Society. Especially not when Sarah was researching one of her own projects, which tended to absorb all of her immense brain at once.

 

            "I do, Sarah. At _least_ as far as I can throw him." Jenny got up, and laid her book down on the stack. The housekeeper would be by in the morning. "I'm going to stretch my legs."

 

            "Good idea," Sarah murmured. Jenny slipped out of the library, and the heavy wooden door closed softly behind her.

 

***

 

_Jenny's used to people thinking that she's intelligent but not bright, and also to their rescinding the former if she doesn't pay close attention to her neckline. At nineteen, she hasn't really worked out if she wants to use this or not. It just happens._

_That's probably why her lecturer in the history of mediaeval art is stupid enough to give her not only the papers and books that prove he had the knowledge to forge the recently rediscovered Lindisfarne Book of Hours, but also the return ticket to a town that Jenny realises, once she gets out an atlas, is fifteen minutes' brisk walk from the mouldering attic where it was found._

_If Jenny were him she would have burnt the ticket, but then again, if Jenny were him, she wouldn't have left her bank statements on her desk where someone else might read them, especially not if those bank statements proved that she was a few hundred thousand pounds in debt. Posh students of art history can read upside-down too, even if they have breasts. It's not exactly difficult._

_Jenny applies some thought to this. She likes her lecturer reasonably well, and a forged book of devotions isn't exactly the stuff of Bond movies, but the British Library is prepared to pay millions for it, and on the whole Jenny would rather subject the lecturer to bankruptcy proceedings than watch the Library try to raise an impossible sum of money for a particularly beautiful fake. She finishes her essay in record time, but claims she's having difficulty so she won't have to give the books back, and when she's done she takes what she knows to the police. Because she's a considerate young woman, she does so in the form of photocopied print-outs of the atlas and papers, relevant sections highlighted and cross-referenced._

_"Just because he could have done doesn't mean he did," says the detective who talks to her._

_"When you know how you know who," Jenny says automatically, because if anyone would have cared about a forged book, Lord Peter Wimsey would have done. And then, because the detective's looking a little peeved, she produces the ticket and explains about the bank statements._

_The Fraud Squad's thank-you note comes in the form of a compliments slip and the forged book of hours. Jenny spends a week of her summer holidays taking it apart until she knows for sure how to tell it's a fake._

 

***

 

            Jenny knew she could walk for hours just around the interior of Castle Anburgh - but she had more than a few hours until Abby was due back. She started the familiar circuit anyway, her feet in their sheepskin-lined indoor shoes sliding on the polished floor of the long gallery and padding softly over the stone flags of the main hall and kitchen, pausing at the doors as if listening for signs of life, head-counting. Abby's room, Sarah's room, Jenny's room, two guest rooms, study, kitchen, dining-room, downstairs loo, guests' bathrooms, living-room, library, games room full of reptiles in terrariums, double-locked and coded equipment room disguised as a cleaning cupboard, situation room with its plethora of screens and computers, drawing room for formally receiving clients. All were present and correct and immaculate. Jenny couldn't answer for the suite of rooms where her few staff lived, since it was, naturally, locked, and - equally naturally - they had the key, and Jenny wasn't going to interfere with their trust by fetching her copy of it just so that she could satisfy her night-time anxieties. She walked through the small, self-contained suite she used for external forces when she had to employ them and needed them under her eye, but containable. It was empty with the silence of disuse; Jenny hadn't needed to call on outside help for at least the last year, and saw no prospect of needing to do so in the immediate future.

 

            It wouldn't pay, though, to have it turned into anything else. The gun safe and other unique fittings would have to be removed or moved, for one thing. Perhaps one day in the future. But right now, it wouldn't pay, and Jenny had always had a keen eye on what would pay. If she hadn't, Anburgh would be in the hands of a stranger with a lot of money, and she would have minded that even more than she would have done her grandmother leaving it to her cousin. Mortimer had many faults, but he was a Lewis, and he was, technically, the head of the family. Not that Jenny had paid him much attention in recent years, since he disapproved of her Scandalous Antics and regularly told her she ought to have stayed in PR full-time.

 

            But Anburgh was _Jenny's_. Jenny's, because her grandmother had not been a stupid woman, and she had known that the only one of her grandchildren who would fight for Anburgh as it deserved to be fought for was Jenny.

 

            Jenny stopped at the overflowing coat rack in the great hall, unearthed a moth-eaten Barbour and a pair of boots from underneath Sarah's trench-coat, Abby's leather jacket and an assortment of gilets, wellies and trainers, and pulled a soft indigo infinity scarf over her head as she zipped the coat up to the collar. The pre-dawn chill in the north of England was no joke.

 

            She climbed the main staircase and turned left, stopping at an unobtrusive door, and unlocked it with a key pulled from her pocket. She climbed another, narrower, darker staircase, unlocked another door, and stepped out onto the battlements of Castle Anburgh.

 

            She walked a slow circuit around the crenellations, grey and rough in the dark but never unfamiliar. The sky turned over her, a black velvet blanket, and she tipped her head up to watch the stars before looking down at the grounds below. The green lawns, shrubs and trees. The more public outer buildings, carefully fenced away, including the bed and breakfast her housekeeper's daughter ran under strict conditions, inside the reconstructed 'castle town', maintained by English Heritage at their own cost on land leased to them by Jenny. The remains of Jenny's great-great-aunt's formal garden, which had been her father's favourite place to play hide-and-seek with her. The long stretch of beach, now covered by the whispering sea, that shielded Anburgh on one side. The floodlights and flat-roofed buildings where James Lester held sway - where various discreet branches of government had held sway for almost the last hundred years. Although probably few of them had been so rigorously held to account on their rent, and Jenny knew for a fact that most of them had not been allowed to play football on Castle Anburgh's lawns, though Jenny's grandmother had sometimes invited her shadowy neighbours for tea - provided they were officers, and on condition that they wiped their boots.

 

            It was Jenny's home, exactly as it had always been, more or less, since her childhood, and Jenny had fought to keep it that way. And if some of the things she did to make that happen were a little unorthodox, well, she wasn't the only Lewis with an eye for the main chance. That was how they'd ended up with a castle in the first place.

 

            "I'm winning, Grandma," Lady Jennifer Manningtree-Lewis said into the night, and the night said nothing back.

 

***

_"Let me tell you, Lester, this woman can find anything," Hugo is boasting. Jenny comes abruptly down to earth, mostly because Hugo has just clapped her on the back and she almost fell off her vertiginous heels as a consequence, but partly because James Lester, who has clever blue eyes and a thin, sly mouth, is watching her with a sort of calculation that puts her on her guard. This is the sort of do where it doesn't matter if Jenny zones out a little, normally. It's almost entirely full of people she knows and most of them owe her a favour. But some are links of her network that she needs to work on, and others might be useful for her day job - in PR you can always use more contacts - and still others might have lost something that needs finding, because Hugo is right about one thing at least: that's her specialty. Jenny can't afford to get distracted right now, even if her grandmother's dead. In fact, she especially can't afford to get distracted right now, because Anburgh is hers, and that means the death duties are hers too. Jenny makes very good money and there are plenty of extraneous things she can sell and economies she can make, but she still doesn't know if she can find the money._

_She finds a practised smile. "Telling tales out of school, Hugo?"_

_James Lester arches an eyebrow. "I don't know, is he? James Lester, by the way. I don't believe I've had the pleasure."_

_Jenny shakes his hand. She already knows his name and she's sure he already knows hers. "Jennifer Manningtree-Lewis," she says. She doesn't need to use her title._

_"A pleasure, Lady Jennifer."_

_Not if Lester's going to use it for her, anyway. She smiles and turns to Hugo. "I found you a tank, Hugo. Tanks are quite large and reasonably difficult to miss. It wasn't hard."_

_Hugo raises his eyebrows. "I couldn't find it."_

_"You weren't looking in the right place." Jenny softens it with another smile, this one more genuine. Hugo's sweet. He always has been. This is why Jenny allowed herself to spend a week truffling around South Wales in search of a tank she neither wanted nor needed in exchange for nothing more than a very nice dinner and the gratitude of the regiment - although the gratitude of the regiment has proven very useful over the last two years, so she shouldn't scoff._

_James Lester is watching them with needle-sharp eyes. She smiles and excuses herself to talk to Annalise - who is going for a job at Sotheby's and deserves to get it - but she's not at all surprised when James Lester reappears half an hour later and offers to fetch her a drink, since he's going to the bar himself. Jenny asks for, and gets, a single gin and tonic with Tanqueray and lime. She thanks Lester with another smile, knowing that they're getting increasingly feeble as covers for her interest in what's happening now._

_"I was impressed to hear that you found that tank," Lester says. "I knew something of how the tank in question got lost, but not how it was recovered."_

_"Then you know more than I do," Jenny lies. "Hugo wouldn't tell me." This is not true, but the colonel wasn't supposed to have told Jenny how it got lost, and he's her grandmother's godson; she owes it to him to cover for him. "In any case, as I said, it wasn't difficult."_

_He flicks her a quick sceptical eyebrow. "I bow to your superior knowledge of the situation. Was it the first time you'd rendered official assistance?"_

_"Yes," Jenny says. "If you can call it official. It wasn't."_

_"In deference to Hugo's sensibilities, we shall call it official. Would you be interested in a similar, if slightly more subtle, enterprise?"_

_Jenny sips at her gin and tonic. "If I'd wanted to join the security services, I would have applied." She never did. They don't pay as well, and Jenny favours the urbanity of a Peter Wimsey over the psychopathy of a James Bond._

_"So I had supposed. But I don't need a spy, I need someone with your peculiar understanding of the lost and found." James Lester raises his glass to someone across the room who's engaged in a conversation, but grins and salutes him in return. Jenny recognises Lady Ampleforth, who is a great deal of fun, especially since she's cut off her blackmailer. Jenny was pleased to be of assistance._

_"What are you missing?" Jenny asks._

_"A USB stick. Encrypted, and it hasn't yet been cracked, or we'd know," Lester adds when Jenny opens her mouth to protest. She's no computer scientist; she can't track or expunge digital files. She does valuables, in a loose sense of the word. "You would be suitably remunerated, of course. Part on acceptance of the task and part on completion."_

_"Is this going to get me arrested or killed?" Jenny enquires._

_"Certainly not the former," Lester says. "Think it over, and if you'd like to know more, call me and we'll discuss it further."_

_Jenny tucks the business card he offers her into her bag. "I'm certainly intrigued."_

_As it happens, Christine Johnson is at the spa Jenny's attending that weekend for a hen party. Apparently she's the bride's sister-in-law. The bride can't stand her, and neither can Jenny; the bride is furious that Christine keeps pulling out her laptop and a memory stick, but Jenny's thrilled and suspicious. Why would Christine risk something so valuable?_

_Maybe she wants to make it normal. The bride and her friends are influential and the stick conspicuously normal - as well as Christine's work it contains holiday photos they've all been forced to look at. Maybe Christine wants to make herself look wrongly accused if Lester moves too soon._

_Jenny pickpockets the stick they've all seen so much of, and after an interval of a few hours, she hides it between the sofa cushions where Christine was sitting. Christine's annoyed, but she barely reacts. Jenny finds the real memory stick in a cleverly re-sealed tampon packet inside a half-used box of Tampax, and, after a moment's thought, takes them both. She bins the wrapper in a bathroom downstairs and the latex gloves she borrowed from a cleaning cupboard get dropped near a cleaning cart, where they'll be noticed and hurriedly picked up in moments._

_Christine flies into a rage and turns the spa upside-down. She's accused everyone but Jenny and the bride of perfidy and theft, and is about to round on Jenny when one of the staff finds the fake memory stick near Christine's place at dinner, where Jenny left it, and the bride flies into a rage of her own. By the end of the hour, Christine's been expelled from the bridal party, and by the end of the week, she's been expelled from her job and is subject to unspecified legal proceedings._

_Jenny cracks open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot with the bride to celebrate Christine's departure. When she receives her payment from Lester, she cracks open another at a small graveyard in the north of England and pours a glass for herself, a glass for the patient vicar and bemused churchwarden, and a glass over her grandmother's grave, because she's just paid off the last of the inheritance tax on Anburgh. The adventure and satisfaction of the whole enterprise fizzes in her diaphragm just like the champagne._

_Maybe that's where it_ **_really_ ** _starts._

 

***

 

             Jenny stared out into the darkness, and it grew no more communicative. The stars glittered about her head, so much brighter than they ever were in London. Jenny had once tried to stargaze in London the way she had at Anburgh as a child, carrying blankets and hot chocolate and dragging her fiancé onto the roof of the London townhouse she had sold and replaced with a small flat when she'd inherited Anburgh. The fiancé had gone at the same time as the townhouse, creating a minor kerfuffle in the social pages of _Tatler_ \- who persisted in referring to her as a Lady Detective. Jenny knew for a fact that her grandmother's old butler, who had helped raise her, meticulously tracked every mention and kept the cuttings as a form of personal amusement - but Jenny hadn't cared.

 

            Abby had once told Jenny, when they were all swapping stories of discarded boyfriends and girlfriends, that that was a sign that she should have dumped him long before. Jenny concurred. Who needed someone who didn't understand the centre of their world?

 

            She tipped her face up to the stars and picked out the old familiar constellations, found polar North as easy as she breathed, and wondered if it was warm enough to bring blankets out here and watch the stars until dawn came or Abby returned in one piece. As if in answer, a gust of wind sliced at her, a blast of ice down one cheek and the side of her neck, and Jenny shook herself and decided against. She gave the stars one last look, admired the almost cloudless charcoal silk of the sky flowing over the sea, and turned back to complete one last circuit of the battlements and return to the main house, locking the door carefully behind her. Jenny knew most people didn't realise you could walk along Anburgh's battlements; only the family had been up there for decades, and the house itself hadn't been open to the public since the early 1900s, when facilities had first been leased to shadower arms of government. Jenny would certainly never consider allowing a total stranger into it now. But she knew exactly how good she was at finding unexpected and unaccounted-for ways into and out of places, so she had recently had the door replaced with a more solid one and the bolts and locks reassessed. She patted it with an absent hand; the contractors Sarah and Abby had picked out for her while she was helping an old Italian university friend track down and expunge a fake in his art collection had done good work.

 

            Jenny thought her grandmother, who had died in her sleep with all her most valuable jewellery stuffed into the mattress beneath her, would have approved. She smiled as she made her way back through the house, trying not to think too hard about what she could do with herself next, and decided to check all the radiators. Abby had been talking about how they needed bleeding, but the operation that was hopefully now coming to a close somewhere in Worcestershire had absorbed all of them in research and evidence-gathering for weeks, and Jenny knew for a fact that she hadn't had time.

 

            Four of the radiators were burbling; she bled them all, tipped the excess water away, and then stood helplessly, at a loose end again. She sighed and ran her hands through her hair, and made her way back to the library to talk to Sarah, but when she opened the door the still hush made it plain that Sarah had fallen asleep on her work, and any words died on Jenny's lips.

 

            She sighed again, but smiled fondly. Sarah had fallen asleep with a pen in her hand, biro ink smeared over her long fingers, her other hand tucked under one sand-gold cheek and her dark hair falling every which way, papers under her head. The lamps were still lit, one on her desk and one standing by the armchair Jenny had sat in to read, and they traced light over Sarah's long, finely-made limbs and the crown of her head, the curve of the slight, unconscious smile that Jenny couldn't not return. Jenny leaned over her, careful not to disturb her, and peered at the last few crabbed lines that Sarah had written, but Sarah's tiredness showed in the writing and Jenny could only make out something about ground-penetrating radar and continental shelves, with nothing to indicate a connection of any sort.

 

            Jenny switched off the standing lamp by her armchair and fetched a soft blue woolly blanket from the living room to drape around Sarah, carefully prising the pen from her fingers and wiping her stained hand before brushing her hair out of her face and wrapping the blanket around her. Sarah stirred and her eyelids flickered, but she recognised Jenny and slid back under the surface of sleep before Jenny could so much as speak to reassure her, one hand curling into the edge of the blanket and drawing it tighter around herself.

 

            Jenny turned off the last lamp and sneaked out of the library as quietly as possible, hissing as she stubbed her toe on the space heater but not swearing. She sometimes thought Sarah was too trusting, too serene, for someone who had accidentally become a member of a firm of freelance detectives. If you could really call them detectives; Jenny preferred to describe herself as a specialist in the lost and found, if only because she didn't solve crimes so much as she undid them, and because she avoided cases involving missing people wherever possible. It was the biggest condition she had set on her arrangement with Lester: she would not find people for him.

 

            "Why not?" Lester had asked, and mentioned the name 'Helen Cutter'.

 

            Jenny had mentioned the concept of extraordinary rendition, and Lester had dropped the subject like a hot coal. Her lips twitched as she remembered the speed with which he had moved the conversation on, and she let herself into the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. The kitchen had probably changed more than anything else since Jenny was a little girl; she had paid for the refurbishment with the severance package from her last full-time PR contract, and was inordinately pleased with it. It was tasteful, she thought, but modern. And the fact that a layperson could use the oven without burning the bottom out of a pan was a vast improvement on the previous oven, which only her grandmother's former butler knew the secrets of.

 

            She sat for a while at the kitchen table with her cup of tea steaming before her, flicking desultorily through her collection of recipe books and mentally organising the contents of the store-cupboards and fridge. She probably needed to go into town; if she heard Abby was in hospital she'd get her indefatigable housekeeper to do it, but if not, that could be an activity for the morning, when the supermarket in the nearest town opened... If not, they had enough for a cooked brunch and a simple pasta supper, it could wait... But...

 

            Jenny shook her head crossly and shoved her hands into her hair again. Normally, reorganising details that weren't life or death was soothing, a sort of mental Tetris that kept her brain ticking over on something harmless. But now they just tangled in her brain like skeins of knitting, an art Jenny had never managed to acquire, and left her more restless than ever.

 

            She got up and went over to the kitchen drawers, rifling through the one reserved for pens and bits of paper and the phone book, and took out a hair tie. She pulled her hair back into a fishtail plait, the familiarity of the motions offering her a temporary solace as she tried to think through her remaining options for keeping herself occupied. Her shoe collection could do with reorganising; a button had come astray on a favourite silk blouse and needed repairing. Her youngest uncle and his third wife were proposing to descend on her with their young children next weekend: she ought to think of a menu and find a way of broaching the subject with Abby, who, unlike Sarah, was sometimes a little awkward about being introduced to Jenny's family, alternately convinced that they thought she was the help or that they thought she was Jenny's unusually sapphic bit of rough, or perhaps both at once. Jenny blamed an early encounter with Cousin Mortimer, who still wasn't allowed on the property as a result.

 

            Jenny tied off her plait and looked herself up and down, considering her attire. Then she went upstairs to her room and changed into a plain cotton shirt and an old fisherman's jumper, before letting herself into the gun safe and selecting a shotgun. She slid it into a case and slung it over her back, then picked up a heavy torch from the kitchen and let herself out of the back door.

 

            There was no connection between the home of Castle Anburgh and the government facilities on its grounds, so Jenny switched her torch on and walked the long way round to the front, feet crunching on gravel, silent on grass, tapping on tarmac. The sentry obviously both saw and heard her coming; she walked straight up to the guardhouse, stepped under its light where she could be clearly seen, and presented her pass.

 

            "Jenny Lewis," she said. "Here to borrow your rifle range, as agreed with Sir James. You may wish to confirm this with Captain Ryan."

 

            The sentry, a dark-eyed, friendly-faced lad Jenny recognised as Kermit Cooper, grinned and handed her card back. "I know who you are, Lady Jennifer. I'll radio up for an escort, if you'll just wait a minute."

 

            "Thank you," Jenny said, smiling and dredging up a few relevant details from the back of her brain. Kermit had a wife who looked just as impossibly young and deceptively sweet-natured as him: a grey-eyed little lass with long caramel hair and a baby on her hip, a little girl, Jenny thought. They'd visited for a weekend, and stayed in the bed and breakfast in the castle town. "How's your wife? And the baby?"

 

            Kermit beamed and fished out a set of baby photos, and Jenny settled in to wait.

 

***

_Three weeks after Christine Johnson retires from public life, Jenny's at the British Museum, feeling pleased with herself because everything's gone right. She was upset, temporarily, over the acrimonious departure of her fianc_ _é_ _several months ago when it became apparent that Jenny would do anything to keep Castle Anburgh in her hands, but that's long gone. Pictures of him appeared in the society pages yesterday morning with delicate beauties ten years his junior hanging off him, but Jenny only snorted and went out for cocktails with her friends. The sun is shining and she had brunch with Hugo this morning, and she's got tickets to the biggest exhibition of the year._

_She trips up the steps to the British Museum with confidence in her stride and a smile on her face, and lines up in the queue for Pyramids, a high-profile collaboration between the British Museum and the Egyptian government to bring key artefacts together and display them all over the world. The reviews have been ecstatic enough to make Jenny regret turning down the offer of a plus-one ticket to the launch, hailing it as the most breathtakingly impressive exhibition of Ancient Egyptian artefacts since the earliest discoveries were brought to European shores. Jenny's keen to see if it lives up to the hype. Going by the bright grin on the face of the woman in front of her in line, tall and lean with shrewd, lively black eyes and an air of barely suppressed excitement, she's not the only one. Jenny returns her grin, and focuses her attention on the programme she bought._

_The exhibition is just as good as Jenny had hoped; the part of her that enjoyed art history so much and lobbied to be able to join the archaeologists' Ancient Egyptian Art and Symbolism course is revelling in every moment. But part of her is curious. Something feels off, and Jenny's attention is constantly dragged away from the exhibits to the woman who had been in front of her in the line, who had produced a British Museum ID card and been waved straight through while Jenny was catechised about the contents of her handbag and reminded that flash photography might damage some of the more fragile objects. The woman keeps half-frowning at things, tilting her head quizzically, narrowing her eyes. Nobody else has noticed, but once or twice Jenny catches her gaze, and the unknown woman raises her eyebrows and purses her lips before moving on, flipping her terracotta scarf over her shoulder, tucking her black hair behind one ear._

_Jenny will admit to being intrigued, but she doesn't intend to do anything about it until she finds herself standing next to the woman at the cordon around the final exhibit, an expertly reconstructed and braced funerary chariot with goods and sarcophagus. Jenny admires it for a long moment._

_"It's fake," the woman says._

_"Sorry, what?"_

_The woman lifts her decided chin in the direction of the chariot. "That."_

_Jenny looks at the chariot and at the faces of the security men (who haven't heard a thing) and the paying public (some of whom have, and look a bit unnerved). "It's not the only thing you think is fake, is it?"_

_The woman grins. "Nope," she says with a certain relish._

_There's champagne fizzing in Jenny's diaphragm again. She extends a hand to the woman. "Jenny Lewis. Do let me buy you a coffee - I'd be very interested in hearing more about your thought processes."_

_The woman shakes her hand. "Sarah Page," she says, and the glint in her eyes is a perfect match for that in Jenny's. "I know just the place."_

 

***

 

            Jenny only had to wait a few minutes before she glanced up and saw Captain Ryan making his way down the road that ran through the facilities, and Kermit wished her a good morning and buzzed her through at last.

 

            "Morning, Lady Jennifer," Captain Ryan said, meeting her on the other side of the gates as they creaked shut behind her. "This is a bit early for you, isn't it?"

 

            "That's one way of putting it," Jenny said, neatly eliding the fact that it was now three in the morning and she plainly hadn't slept. "And if I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times. It's _Jenny_."

 

            Captain Ryan's wide mouth twitched and they turned and walked back up the road, passing buildings that were silent and shuttered - and one or two, intriguingly, that were still lit. Jenny had guessed he would be here, watching the progress and outcome of the assignation Abby had joined, but apparently quite a number of others had too; she didn't slow her steps, knowing she knew as much as she was allowed to and perhaps a little more.

 

            "I'll take that under advisement. Kermit says you're wanting a crack at the firing range?" His eyes darted to the long green bag slung across her back.

 

            "I was hoping for a go at that old clays machine of yours," Jenny said. "I've got my shotgun. By the way, when am I allowed to congratulate you on your promotion?"

 

            Ryan's step faltered in surprise, and perhaps a little in the last remains of the limp from the terrible mauling he'd received from one of Lester's suspicious wild animals, more than a year ago. "Where do you get your information, Lady Jennifer?"

 

            "Here and there," Jenny said, smiling under the streetlights.

 

            Ryan shook his head. "Well." He paused. "Give it a couple of weeks, it's not a done deal yet."

 

            "I won't jinx you," Jenny said, and they walked for another few minutes before reaching the gate that led to the range.

 

            Ryan laid his hand on the gate and squinted out into the darkness; Jenny could dimly see the floodlights on its edges that would spill light everywhere when Ryan flicked the switches on the grey box by the gate, like lights on a football field. "Are you worrying about Abby?"

 

            "Of course," Jenny said.

 

            "She'll be fine," Ryan said, looking down at her a little opaquely. "We just heard they're done out there. So she'll be back soon."

 

            "That's good," Jenny said, through the rush of relief sweeping through her veins and making her almost light-headed. "Thank you for telling me."

 

            Ryan nodded, and his eyebrows flickered. "And now you'd like to shoot things."

 

            The corners of Jenny's mouth twitched with amusement and she flattened them as best she could, trying to stay as serious and calm as possible to match Ryan. "Yes please."

 

***

 

_Abby she finds when she's on a private case. An old schoolfriend's husband has had a very beautiful Bentley stolen, and for reasons he refuses to go into, he won't go to the police. Jenny has no idea how he's squaring this with the insurance, or indeed if it is insured. But that's not her problem - at least not currently. Jenny has a good working relationship with Scotland Yard, or at least certain members of it. They'll appreciate her tip-off that something's not quite right. They won't care if they get it after she finds the car._

_"You can find it, can't you, Jenny?" Christabel's eyes are pleading. She looks worn down, and Jenny wonders if her husband's taking his anger at the lost car out on her._

_"I'll do my best," Jenny says, and takes half of her exorbitant fee upfront. She mentally earmarks it for Christabel's solicitor: Jenny's reasonably confident she can find the car, so long as it hasn't left the country, and from the few reluctant details she coaxed out of Christabel's spoilt brat of a husband he actually does have a good idea who took the car and why, and they won't have taken it out of the country. The whole point is mockery._

_Jenny feels a certain sympathy for them. She would quite like to do worse than mock Christabel's husband, given how thin and worn-down Christabel looks. She'll settle for paying for a divorce lawyer with the husband's own money._

_She's investigating a potential fence, the link between the gang who stole the car and the people who paid for it to be stolen, and has arrived at his office - well, his house - when the front door's opened by a small woman, slight but tough-looking, bleach blonde and wearing clothes that proclaim her to be an employee of Wellington Zoo. This is not what Jenny was expecting._

_"I'm looking for Terry Rogers," Jenny says._

_"He hasn't come home for a couple of days," the woman says. "We think he's bailed on the rent. Wanker."_

_"Any ideas where he is?" Jenny enquires._

_Abby shrugs. "Maybe. Maybe not. He's not - I don't know him that well, I don't really care."_

_"How do you know him?" Jenny's genuinely interested._

_"Jim met him at a rally. He likes cars. We like cars. We were looking for someone for the third bedroom." Abby shrugs again. "Any more questions?"_

_"A few."_

_"Well, come in and I'll put the kettle on."_

_Jenny crosses the threshold to find the house is small and cramped but much better kept than she might have expected, and also unexpectedly full of reptiles. "Whose are the lizards?"_

_"Mine." Abby stops to smile affectionately at some kind of yellowy snake. "Terry used to tell me I could get a lot of money for them if I wanted to sell. Usually when he was behind on the rent."_

_That fits with the man Jenny's had described to her. Fairly small-time, weak-willed, mercenary, but cunning and discreet and good at talking big. "Has he ever taken any of them?"_

_Something flashes in Abby's ice-blue eyes and the set of her jaw, and Jenny's intrigued now. "No. He knows better."_

_"Is this moral knowledge or practical knowledge?"_

_Abby switches on the kettle. "He knows I could kick his breastbone into his backbone. If that's what you mean."_

_"You don't like him."_

_Abby grimaces. "No. He's dodgy. I always said he was."_

_"So why are you living with him?"_

_Abby shoots her an ironic glance, fetching down two mugs which are chipped but clean. "Zookeepers don't earn much. Are all your questions going to be about me?"_

_"No," Jenny says, and takes out a picture of the missing car. "Some of them are going to be about this. Others are going to be about Terry's movements over the last two weeks."_

_"Huh," Abby says, picking up the picture. Her eyes widen and narrow. "Expensive. Custom, isn't it?"_

_Jenny nods._

_"I would've said this was out of Terry's league." Abby puts a mug of tea in front of Jenny._

_"I've got reason to believe he drove it for a while."_

_Abby nods absently. "He's good enough. I'll give him that. He could handle something like this." One eyebrow goes up, and she turns the paper over as if she's looking for the specifications. "At least, if it's as powerful as it looks."_

_"It is." The one thing Christabel's husband had been happy to talk about was the car's potential._

_"Well," Abby says, and rubs a hand over her mouth, sitting down. "Here's what I can tell you about Terry."_

_That case doesn't end well, not from Jenny's point of view, even though she comes out of it with all the advantages. She finds the car, but first she calls in a missing person alert for Terry Rogers, and they only find his body. She gets the money, and Christabel gets a handsome divorce settlement, and they both get a bad taste in their mouth when Christabel's husband's only reaction to hearing about Terry Rogers' death is, "So - where's my car?"_

_But when Jenny left Terry's house that day she pressed a business card into Abby's hand. Not one of the Lady Jennifer Manningtree-Lewis ones, not one of the Jennifer Lewis, PR consultant ones, but one that says simply Lost and Found, with a single phone number. She finds Abby impressive, and her knowledge of mechanics and animals and martial arts and zoos could be very useful; Jenny turned down a request to find somebody's tiger cub the other day. "Let me know if you're considering a change of career," she said to Abby when she left her on the doorstep. "I pay much better than Wellington Zoo."_

_The phone call, a day after the inquest that rules Terry Rogers's death to be murder, is not wholly unexpected._

_"So," Abby says on the other end of the line, without really bothering to introduce herself. She sounds annoyed; Jenny wonders who annoyed her.  "The zoo are trying to transfer me to the elephant house, I can't afford the rent here without a third housemate, the place is heaving with journalists, Jim's drinking himself to death, and working for a lady detective sounds interesting. Are you still going to offer me a job?"_

_"Yes," Jenny says, amused. "Bring the lizards."_

***

 

            It wasn't until hours after Jenny came back from the shooting range, replaced her shotgun in the gun safe and took a shower that Abby returned. Jenny was walking around the battlements again, this time without a torch; dawn was breaking red and purple over Castle Anburgh, shining on the slick sand of the beach at low tide, the faintest film of water still flung over it by the lowest waves. The new sunlight smoothed Anburgh's blunt, functional edges, and lit up the pale dot of Abby's white hair as she entered the grounds.

 

            _Built to endure_ , Jenny thought, and wondered if she meant Abby, Anburgh, Sarah,  herself, or all four at once. There were darknesses in Abby's past that she still wouldn't touch on, and Sarah had been the victim of a sustained and vicious smear campaign while they proved the truth of the British Museum forgeries, directed at ruining her career. Sarah had refused to cave; Abby refused to cave every day of her life. And the proof of Jenny's own refusal to cave was in the blunt-edged stone under her fingertips.

 

            Jenny patted the battlements and waved to Abby, who waved back. Five minutes later, Abby joined her, slightly out of breath and glowing with a sense of satisfaction and self-conscious cleanliness which didn't hide the fact that her eyebrows had recently been scorched.

 

            "Bit early for you to be up," Abby said, when she reached Jenny on the seaward side of the battlements.

 

            "I didn't sleep. What happened to your eyebrows?"

 

            Abby grinned. "I blew up a car. Or two. Maybe more than two."

 

            "Lester's footing the bill."

 

            "Trust me, there isn't going to be a bill." Abby leant against the battlements and looked out to sea. "It went well. We got everything we wanted. Lester's story about what those animals are is bullshit, but he was right about the conditions they were being kept in, and they weren't being properly handled." She glanced at Jenny. "Do we care about anything else?"

 

            "Not until it poses a clear and present threat to national security," Jenny said. In truth, she doubted Lester would expose her or Abby or Sarah to any treason he was committing; he would know that she wouldn't tolerate that. "Or tries to eat you."

 

            Abby grinned. "That's why I have the boys with the big guns to back me up."

 

            Jenny smiled.

 

            "They've got a computer genius, too. Skinny dark kid in a pork pie hat. He knew his stuff."

 

            "Do you want me to poach him?" Jenny enquired.

 

            Abby wrinkled her little nose. "No, but I think we need someone like him."

 

            There was an immaculate CV and a polite, if slightly puppyish, cover letter on Jenny's desk, from a girl called Jess Parker who had always wanted to be a detective and knew a great deal more about cybersecurity than most nineteen-year-olds. Jenny considered the possibility of an internship - and packing her off to university to acquire some life skills and a degree. "I'll see what I can do," she said at last. "In the meantime: breakfast. I'll go and make a start on the French toast if you'll go and wake up Sarah."

 

            "Done," Abby said promptly. "Can I have extra bacon?"

 

            "Yes," Jenny said, watching the light on the water, and then thought of something suddenly and turned, just as Abby was about to go down the staircase into the house. "Abby!" she called.

 

            "What?" Abby shouted back.

 

            "Welcome home," Jenny yelled.

 

            Abby's smile was brighter than the rising sun, and Jenny's feet were firmly planted on every stone she'd ever called her own.

 

            _I won, Grandma_ , Jenny thought.


End file.
